...Population: Two.Eleven days ago, we visited with some family members and their adorable 18-month old baby. Baby was bright and beautiful, toddling about...and his little baby nose was dripping. The wee one was coughing. The wee one was sick.This particular writing team knew enough to avoid the precious virus-carrier but we mistakenly believed that good hand washing and our mutant healing abilities would be enough to ward off any possible illness. Two days later, we both learned this was wrong.Feeling neither bright nor beautiful, we've been toddling about for the last nine days, our uncute non-baby noses dripping. We've been coughing. We've been sick.Not that you care but it's currently 22 degrees Fahrenheit outside (-5.5556 Celsius to the rest of the world) and that doesn't count the wind chill factor. And, baby, the wind is blowing. We know, we know: We finally get back to our website and all we do is whine. After all, we're pretty certain this isn't the flu -- neither of us has had high fevers or a general body ache -- but it's been a fairly intense cold. We're happy to report that Baby has shaken the bug completely. A casual friend heard about our misery and knew exactly what we could do to get over our sickness. (Sicknesses? Sicknessi?) In a loving and generous spirit, she sent us some info.Read this, her email commanded. It may save your life.Intrigued, and currently in favor of saving our lives, we read on. Per the e-message, we discovered that a frozen lemon peel is a marvelous thing. Grated into fine slivers of peel-ness, it can be sprinkled over any food product: All foods will unexpectedly have a wonderful taste, something you may never have experienced before...an experiment one of us wanted to try immediately and preferably over a Little Debbie Cream Cheese Streusel Cake. (There are NINE grams of fat in one of those Little Debbie cakes and no person alive sits down to eat a single Little Debbie cake. Mutant healing ability doesn't prevent a bulging belly. Just sharing.) But there was still more to learn about the marvelous lemon and its peel.The email revealed lemon peels contain 5 to 10 times more vitamins than lemon juice itself andthese peels are health rejuvenators in eradicating toxic elements in the body. That's the lemon secret! Better late than never, right? The surprising benefits of lemon!...all of which we could probably accept because, c'mon, we just don't care enough to do the research. Also, the California Lemon Industry probably doesn't count on the fruit's rind to send their profits soaring. While we weren't going to throw some lemon zest into our oatmeal, we were considering adding a container of Newman's Own Old Fashioned Lemonade onto the shopping list.Our friend sent us this information to help us battle a little respiratory inconvenience. The original composer of this letter wanted to make an even bigger claim: Lemon is a miraculous product to kill cancer cells, the email continued. It is 10,000 times stronger than chemotherapy. Why do we not know about that? Because there are laboratories interested in making a synthetic version that will bring them huge profits -- and, The source of this information is fascinating: it comes from one of the largest drug manufacturers in the world, says that after more than 20 laboratory tests since 1970, the extracts revealed that it destroys the malignant cells in 12 cancers, including colon, breast, prostate, lung and pancreas...

Because we've both lost loved ones to the disease, we're a little sensitive about bogus cancer cures. This time, we did do our research and shame on whoever started this silly horsepap. (Horsepap is a really cool new word and it's being used by all the celebrities. You should use it, too.) We discovered that the drug manufacturers aren't hiding a series of lemony fresh lab tests to profit on human agony. We learned that the lemon tree is not yet more effective than chemotherapy in treating cancers. As it turns out, this bit of quasi-nonsense has been floating around in the electronic sphere for awhile now and it came to the attention of Snopes.com. Bottom line on the email we received? All of those claims are hyperbole and exaggeration and not supported by facts.For now, we'll leave the Newman's on the shelf while we continue to wash our hands and blow our noses. Next week, we'll talk about what's been happening, writing-wise. Also, next week, Harrell promises to reveal how Little Debbie Cream Cheese Streusel Cake improves sexual performance, strengthens the spine, and eradicates toe fungus...but only if I let him go out and buy a box of the goodies today.Guess we'll never find out.

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Renée & Harrell

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We aren't kidding about the wine.This is where we talk about writing... ...our writing, mostly. We also discuss kiva.org, Hunting Monsters Press, the magic bakery, self-publishing, pseudonyms, life itself -- a bunch of things.